This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 19th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We've never seen this sudden dramatic spike in unemployment claims

that we've seen in the past two months, how quickly can those people

be reabsorbed into the economy.

Most people expect to return to their old jobs, but how realistic is that?

And has the massive new government spending that's followed the

coronavirus outbreak is some of it working in opposition to other spending

Cato's Ryan Bourne helps make sense of the employment picture. We see a lot of different measures of unemployment

that are thrown around the biggest one recently that is so startling as

of course people filing first-time unemployment claims so help us differentiate

what those measures mean.

Well what's clear is that this crisis has obviously had a profound impact on the labour market, but you're right, there's two kind of main measures that people have been looking at in recent weeks.

So the first is this initial unemployment insurance claims, and over the past seven weeks

there's been 33.5 million people file those initial claims and that's

over 20% of the working population. So that means over 20% of the working population. That means over 20% of the working population have been laid off in some way, have left their jobs

and have filed for unemployment insurance.

Now that number doesn't reflect every job lost because

not everyone who loses their job is actually eligible for unemployment insurance and

there's also been quite long delays in some states for

processing those claims and the claims in some states don't count until they are processed.

But at the same time it doesn't give us a full reflection because contrary to what you might think a lot of jobs actually are being created still

...